The latest reports on the eCommerce sales figures within the first quarter by the U.S. Census Bureau, shows the total numbers reaching more than 80.3 Billion, which clearly indicates that eCommerce is going to rule the roost in the days to come. No wonder why every business wants to open an online store which is now among the fastest ways to launch a start-up.

Though it may seem easy to build an eCommerce solution with the number of options available today, it becomes increasingly difficult to choose the best amongst the lot to open the most successful storefront.

Below, we make a comparison among 6 most popular eCommerce platforms: OpenCart vs Prestashop vs Magento vs WooCommerce vs BigCommerce vs Shopify.
We hope this article will be helpful for every business planning to achieve success online.

1. Magento

Overview

The very first in our shopping cart comparison shortlist is a very widespread eCommerce platform – Magento.

Magento, an open-source platform is among the fastest growing platforms with cutting-edge solutions for every entrepreneur who wants to make it big with an eCommerce store. This has a large community of developers willing to contribute comprehensive features for your online stores to make it stand apart from the rest.

Magento provides not only professional look but also very rich interface. It also offers very full functionality that helps you in doing business.

With Magento, you can customize the code as you need and develop any custom features you want.

E-Commerce Design Options

As one of the most popular eCommerce platforms, Magento offers its user a wide – range of extremely beautiful of themes. Design options in Magento are very clean, friendly and easy to responsive design.

There are both free and paid templates. You can find available themes in Magento MarketPlace, Themeforest or Template Monster. It may cost you from $29 to $100 for one.

Cost

There are two Magento version including Magento CE (Community Edition) and Magento EE (Enterprise Edition).

Magento CE is totally FREE, you only need to pay for domain maintenance and hosting, about $10 – $100 depending on your needs.

Magento EE: plan starting at $ 2,000 per month, and you also need to hire a Dev with salary ranges from $10 – $20 per hour.

SEO options

If you are coming up with Magento, you will get many outstanding features such as SEO friendly URLs, Meta tag, Google Sitemap, Google content APIs to enhance your SEO capabilities. It also integrate seamlessly with Google Analytics so you can track the traffic from Search engines.

According to the report from ecommerce market, Magento is the winner when making a comparison about SEO support. For this reason, if you are looking for the best SEO support platforms, Magento is definitely the name that can’t be ignored.

Customer support

Using open source implies that there will be a lot of common problems. But you can find any assistants throughout the develop forums.

Magento CE, as an open and freeform nature, users are not provided with official support services for the platform. However, Magento is a very large community platform. So almost related – topics have been answered.

With the Magento EE version, users can use its technical support services which help to avoid searching for answers in a myriad of community forum threads.

2. WooCommerce

Overview

If you are planning to build your business throughout the internet, absolutely you can’t ignore the most customizable eCommerce platform named WooCommerce.

WooCommerce is a free WordPress plugin where you get every benefit associated with building a WordPress website. Easy to install but will include a fee if you need full integration of WooCommerce as a functional shopping cart. Fully customizable with great shopping cart and payment gateway features.

Owning an eye-catching interface, high security level as well as good pricing, WooCommerce officially won in the hard race to become the best eCommerce platform.

Ecommerce Design Options

For general quality and performance, WooCommerce is preferred over than other platforms. To be honest, WooCommerce is on the top of beauty, modern and professional.

You can find various highly – standard templates, both free and paid at WooThemes.

Besides, more than 6000 themes designed for WordPress and most of them can be modified to work with WooCommerce. Even more, you can go to ThemeForest to find different theme, of course any additional fees are required.

Cost

Although WooCommerce is an open source platform (means that it’s free), but you still have to pay some money to run your website.

Hosting: You’ll need some webspace that allows you to install the updating version. The estimated cost of Hosting is from $5 to $15 per month

Domain: Absolutely, you can’t run your website without a Domain. Depending on domain type, it will cost you approximately $10 per year.

Theme: In case the free themes can’t meet your demands (such as contain hidden backlinks, not provide any support), maybe you want to buy a more premium theme. It is can be found in these sites: WooThemes, Themeforest, TemplateMonster, about $59.

Other costs: Plugins, Extensions, Developer costs…

SEO options

To take advantage of the most well – known blogging WordPress, WooCommerce provides extremely SEO – specific options. You should extend with Yoast SEO plugin for better performance.

Moreover, don’t worry about “URLs and 404 errors”! WordPress usually generates 301 redirects when a product URL has changed, which is great in keeping your website 404 free.

Customer support

Similar to Magento, WooCommerce also has a very large community support where you can find the needed info at $0.

Besides, WooCommerce has got three ways for you to get in contact, depending on what you need help with. Please choose “Submit a support ticket” on the official page of WooCommerce in case you need any technical support.

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3. OpenCart

Overview

OpenCart is a serious competitor in the competition for the best eCommerce Platforms in 2018.

One of the top choices for online stores, OpenCart is simple, perfectly designed and has an unlimited range of products and categories, product ratings and product review sections including multiple currencies and language feature and also advantage from logging error.

It offers more than 13,000 modules and themes, supports multiple payment methods.

Simple to start. Easy to run. These are all reasons brings OpenCart become one of best platform with incredible number – over 342,000 eCommerce Entrepreneurs.

Ecommerce Design Options

May you don’t know that OpenCart does not come with any specific design templates. When you download and install the platform, you will have a basic store interface. There are so many templates for such basic shop. In this case, it was quite attractive, clean and professional.

However, the design management in OpenCart has a bit complicated compared to Shopify and WooCommerce. You need to have some basic knowledge of HTML, CSS and JavaScript to get job done.

Just like other eCommerce Platforms, if you want to upgrade store with more impressive design, do not hesitate to refer to ThemForest, Template Monster or other third party resources.

Cost

Like with WooCommerce and Magento, you will come across with extra money:

Hosting Plan: starting at around $5 per month (or more)

Domain: from $10 per year

Other costs: Themes, Extensions…

SEO options

When coming to the SEO, OpenCart has a long way to go. Although OpenCart offers almost basic SEO features such as: adjust meta titles, descriptions, keywords. However, it requires more tinkering around in code.

In addition, although pride in friendly URLs, it seems that modifications to the meta tags and actions are made like 301 referrals and the rel canonical can be far more complex than they should be.

Customer support

OpenCart now has a quite quality communities where provides totally free support for its users. Besides, this platform also dedicated support with two options: one-time fixed and monthly payment. Both packages are priced $99.

4. Shopify

Overview

This tops the list of one of the popular eCommerce platforms because of its easy setup, faster loading speed and secure payment gateways in addition to customisable templates for all your landing pages. With respect to SEO, Shopify also enables custom Meta tags, auto-generated XML sitemap with superior customer support to assist store owners with chat, email or phone.

It allows you to sell whatever you wish such as physical, digital, products and other services.

Especially, Shopify now has integrated with Amazon. For this reason you can add the latter as a sales channel and sell products from Shopify Admin panel.

Ecommerce Design Options

One of the biggest advantages of Shopify is the quality of its themes. Shopify offers over 54 different professional templates, 10 of which are free. So you can easily create an eye-catching, modern and full-featured online store.

The highlight is that all of these models are mobile-friendly.

Shopify has a bit weak on the theme’s richness when compared to some top platforms like Magento or WooCommerce. However, you can find various premium themes from a third-party provider (eg: ThemeForest).

Cost

As a self-hosted eCommerce platform, Shopify offers three plans. The lowest package costs you 29$, it is the basic plan with all the basics for starting a new business. The second solution provides everything you need for a growing business. If you need some advanced features for scaling your business, “Advanced Shopify” is absolutely best choice.

SEO options

According to Buildwidth, Shopify ranks second compared to Magento about SEO options. It offers to its users the best feature for SEO including: editable title tags, meta descriptions, pages URLs, ALT tags for images, customizable image file names, etc.

Customer support

Excellent support from Shopify! 24/7 support at any time via phone, email or (and) LiveChat on Shopify official homepage. Moreover, its technical team is always available, so you will have right answer immediately after sending your problem.

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5. Prestashop

Overview

Prestashop is among the leading names in the eCommerce industry with many businesses opting it for its advanced ecommerce shopping cart functionalities.

It is a wonderful product between the complexity of Magento and the simplicity of Shopify. PrestaShop takes advantage of a freemium business model – Available for free with two packages namely cloud-based Prestashop and a downloadable form.

You can completely set up a store in minutes, without charging a percentage of revenue like Shopify.

PrestaShop supports a lot of Sales & Marketing activities very well. Unique features such as KPI and Forecasting by Smart Merchant make PrestaShop’s statistical tools even more impressive. Also, it provides you with eCommerce Analytics to evaluate traffic and make profound decisions to increase customer conversions and increase audience exposure.

Currently PrestaShop powers more than 250,000 online stores all over the world. This is really a platform for you to experience.

Ecommerce Design Options

What about PrestaShop design? I just say only a word “Perfect”. Indeed, PrestaShop offers an admirable interface compared with other platforms. Its templates are very scientific and attractive, and you can easily select the most suitable templates matched your business following these options: style, included functionalities, business Sector and Color.

There are more than 15,000 templates available which are all highly customizable to your taste and needs. Also, it’s very easy to find lots of templates developed by other 3d-parties.

Cost

Just free to download, however you have to pay for Domain (~$10 per year), Hosting ($5 – 15$ per month), additional costs such as add-ons, plugins ($50 – $150 per module).

SEO options

In general, PrestaShop also offers a variety of great SEO options such as: edit each page, add high ranking meta tags and even make sure to generate SEO friendly URLs …

However, if you do a marketer will easily notice a small problem in the processing of duplicate content of PrestaShop: It does not use rel = “canonical” very often, which is not very good.

Customer support

Different from the open source mentioned above, all PrestaShop versions are provided advice and technical assistance from the PrestaShop Developer team.

However, the price is quite high. This platform offers 4 support plans: One Shot, Essential, Premium and Deluxe. The least expensive plan is $249 per month for 3 hours of support. Essential plan gives you 6h per year for $399. Premium package supports 12 hours for $699. And the most expensive package is Deluxe, you have to pay up to $1399 and receive 20h support each year.

Support is a complex question when it comes to open source software. Don’t worry if your budget is rather limited. PrestaShop also owns a diverse community of users where they’re working together to solve problems through various forums and services. So you can always get some useful help dramatically.

Moreover, PrestaShop provides users with professional and comprehensive training documents to help you get the maximum out of your online store.

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6. BigCommerce

Overview

The last one in our shopping cart platform comparison is BigCommerce. According to research by Ipsos, BigCommerce merchants grow 28% year over year, nearly 2x the industry average.

BigCommerce is pretty similar to Shopify, but with an addition of more built-in features plus unlimited bandwidth & storage. This also has necessary eCommerce features like gift cards, reviews & ratings, as well as basic marketing tools to give your store a unique look and feel.

With BigCommerce, it is very easy to customize your site, manage shipping and payments, and list your products on Amazon, Ebay, and Facebook as well.

Ecommerce Design Options

BigCommerce offers customizable themes and templates, allowing businesses to change the look of the site without technical skills.

Developers can use the flexible theme framework of BigCommerce to build a fully customized online store using HTML libraries, CSS libraries, and popular code frameworks. It also provides conditional logic for personalizing shoppers and simultaneous previews on the different devices such as desktop screens and mobile.

Conclusion

This topic “eCommerce Platform Comparison” absolutely has never ended. It really doesn’t matter how many articles you see, but only one person who can give you a right answer, and that is you.

Someone likes Magento, WooCommerce or PrestaShop because they can easily customize code, create more functions based their needs. Shopify, BigCommerce may be the great choice for those who want to create an immediately online store without buying Domain, Hosting…

Importantly, you must select a platform that matches your products, your goals as well as your expections.

Based on the comparisons you read above, we hope this post helped you to find the most suitable eCommerce solutions. I highly recommend trying a trial with at least 2 of the 6 shopping carts so that you can make a decision which one feels easiest for you.

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Since 2011, I founded LitExtension Solutions offering shopping cart migration service including Magento, WooCommerce, Shopify,... LitExtension has been the leading provider of automated Shopping Cart Migration Service in the world with more than 20,000 global customers and we have delivered 30,000+ successful migrations to our customers over the past 5 years.